PictureGo!

Version 5.0 - May 2007

The fifth main version of PictureGo!

Another milestone after 7 years of developing: PictureGo! reached version 5.0. A new main version number thanks to the new feature Multiple slide show.

Many slide show programs or picture viewers are able to show thumbnails in various sizes from a given selected folder. PictureGo takes it one step further. With Multiple slide show you can watch a slide show of 2 to 35 pictures at the same time.

When developing this new feature, I myself had some doubts if this would be useful. Those doubts disappeared after seeing the result, it is not only useful, it is also great fun.

Multiple slide show requires for pictures not being very large in size. Simply because it takes quite some time to load 35 pictures of 3 Mb each. The program already has the solution of tackling this problem using Reduce Picture Size to create smaller versions of pictures of a certain folder. It does require a few steps to make this happen though. That is why I can already announce that in PictureGo! 5.1, there will be a one step solution to create a subfolder with smaller versions of the pictures of the parent folder.

Multiple slide show - 35 images

A new main version called for a restyling of the web-site. Always more work than at first anticipated on. The last page I worked on is the Statistics page. Not only the style was changed to meet the new standard, also most of the (rather boring) tables are replaced by colorful graphics. Not very useful to you, the user of PictureGo!, but pleasant to look at.

For me, the most interesting fact of the statistics is that PictureGo! seems to be quite popular in Italy . Though Italy is not the country with the highest number of users (yet), already for over a year Italy has the fastest growing number of PicureGo! users. Rather astonishing realizing that PictureGo! only comes with an English interface.

Another but less pleasant fact is that the number of new users in 2007 has clearly decreased compared to the new users in 2006. One explanation is that in 2006 the old registration system was dropped so that certainly in the first half of the year, lots of old users showed up in the statistics. I have set my hopes on Multiple Slide Show for lots of new users to come aboard. The first signs are very encouraging. I am aiming for 5000 users by the end of the year.

Right after the summer holidays, I will start on programming version 5.1. This version can be expected by the end of summer.